It has drama and corruption, heroes and villains, violent death and a mystery ending. So perhaps it is hardly surprising that the bidding wars have started as studios enter the race to make the first film about the Enron scandal.

Four separate film ventures based on the multi-billion-dollar collapse of the energy company are now under way and others may soon enter the field. Books and articles about the "debacle", as the television news channels like to call it, are being speedily optioned.

When the Enron scandal first broke, the general feeling was that there was an absence of the necessary dramatic and sexual elements to turn it into a successful film.

It seemed to be a story about white men in suits in corporate offices, although violence and tragedy were added to the mix when company vice-chairman Cliff Baxter committed suicide in his Mercedes in January. But now, according to the trade paper Variety, four projects are already under way.

One film is likely to be based on The Enron Wars, an article by Marie Brenner in the April edition of Vanity Fair.

Brenner's heroine is Jan Avery, a former accountant with Enron who noticed something fishy about the accounts back in 1993. As her very first assignment she was asked to justify a loss on the books of $142m. Her boss told her: "We had a little problem," which seems to have the necessary ring of familiarity and ambiguity.

Producer Scott Rubin of Paramount has optioned the article by Brenner, who also wrote the original article on which the Oscar-winning film, The Insider, was based. That, too, was a story about corporate malpractice and intimidated whistle-blowers.

Lowell Bergman, the investigative journalist who was played by Al Pacino in The Insider, is also working as a consultant on an Enron-based drama. This project sprung from Bergman's remarks to New York Times' columnist Maureen Dowd, to whom he suggested that the Enron drama was essentially "The Women vs The Men." The day after the column appeared, a producer was on the phone to Bergman telling him to go ahead with the project.

"I thought - why not?" said Bergman, who added that the project was still in very preliminary stages. Bergman, who made an Enron documentary called The Electric Cowboys, said he believed that the story had all the necessary ingredients for a movie.

"There'll be sex in the Enron movie," he said. "These guys were up to hi-jinks - this was a skyscraper filled with young men and young women and there are lots of stories of strippers in the building ... But more to the point is that they had a kind of ideological belief system that did not accept that they could be wrong. The only ones to question them were the women."

The forthcoming book, Power Failure by Mimi Swartz, is also seen as a potential basis for a film. It features prominently the Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins who is one of the few people to have emerged well from the scandal so far. It is being offered to film-makers as an excellent source by the ICM agency and Watkins is seen as a potential leading character.

The small screen is also interested in Enron projects. CBS plans to make a television movie entitled The Crooked E which is based on the book, Anatomy of Greed, by a young Enron employee called Brian Cruver.

As the scandal unravels, more characters are emerging on whom the film could focus, with Kenneth Lay (Gene Hackman? Jon Voight?) and his wife Linda likely to emerge as key characters.

Linda Lay has already had much small screen exposure, when she misguidedly took to the airwaves to say that her husband knew nothing of what was going wrong at the company and to proclaim that "we've lost everything" - actually the Lays still had property and pay-offs amounting to more than $40m.

While Hollywood is wary of such complex dramas, producers have been encouraged by the success of Erin Brockovich to believe that there is a market for stories about underdogs exposing the misbehaviour of big companies.

There are many potential titles available. But perhaps one of the most appropriate for Enron, Secrets and Lies, has already been used by British director Mike Leigh.